IIW History 1990-2015

Another of the major issues highlighted in the provisional paper by the WG Strategic Planning was how IIW was seen from a global perspective. With Member Countries of IIW now distributed worldwide there was a need to grow the momentum on deciding how to best service these countries. There was also a widely held view within IIW that it was not making itself sufficiently visible to the world at large and that the main vehicle for promoting IIW, the Welding in the World journal, was not serving as useful a purpose as it might have and was less appealing than many other publications. It was also considered in the strategic plan that Welding in the World could

Michel Bramat

be more attractive and therefore would receive a wider readership if it were to contain items of relevant news as well as publishing technical documents. 12 One rather undisguised issue was that the journal was bilingual, being published in both English and French, a further disincentive for the readership and limiting the number of articles in any one issue, while translation added greatly to the costs of publishing. This problem was resolved when English was adopted as the preferred language of IIW in 1994. Bramat was to agree with this resolution and was to comment that ‘The English language was better used by all the participants as far as it prevailed as a worldwide language of exchange. Dropping the French language was not a major technical problem and it was agreed, in principle, to adopt English as the official language of IIW.’ 13 Bramat also identified real issues experienced by a number of individ­ uals and Member Countries in obtaining the greatest benefits from IIW. The implication from his conclusions was that ‘…the vehicle itself is satisfactory but its journeys and destinations needed to be defined within the context of a changing world’. 14 Bramat’s comments echoed to some extent the words of Weck two decades earlier. The changing world was no better emphasised than by IIW’s limited facilities for communication at that time. Contact by telephone, telex and fax were considered more than adequate when the WG Strategic Planning ’s paper was delivered in the early 1990s. Thus the strategic plan did not take into account that by 1990 the World Wide Web had come into being and Bill Gates’ Microsoft Windows 3 had made its debut, both heralding great changes in communication in the years to come. The faith placed in conventional means of communication, therefore, had to change significantly. Importantly, IIW had already shown excellent leadership on other technical issues such as the development of a computerised database containing records of technical documents prepared by its various Working Units and making the information contained

TOWARDS 2000